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Perseverance at Graduate School
After his accident, Lee was rushed to Lehigh Valley Hospital, where doctors surrounded him, inserting tubes everywhere. He remained conscious, though scared and woozy. "Don't do that," he shouted when an attendant began cutting off his favorite gym shorts. "I was still thinking about the big Olympic dream," he says. "I didn't believe it was over."When his family arrived several hours later, his mother and sister broke down in tears. His father, with a look that Lee has never forgotten, said, "See, this is what happened because you disobeyed your parents."
Lee spent the next three months immobilized with a metal halo screwed into his skull to prevent further injury to his neck. What hurt most was that his doctors didn't talk to him about his prognosis. "They'd poke and prod, talk among themselves in their jargon, then leave," Lee remembers. "I felt like a medical experiment." His anger and frustration sparked his own interest in medicine. "I decided that one day I was going to become a caring doctor who offered hope." Shortly before Lee was discharged, a doctor finally gave him the grim news -- the accident had rendered him a quadriplegic. "My Olympic dream ended that day," Lee says. "The thing I had given my life to was over."
He spent most of the next year at Manhattan's famed Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. He hated it. "I felt degraded doing piddling little exercises with three-pound weights attached to my wrists when I'd once been training for the Olympics," he says. But, through rigorous physical therapy, he regained minimal movement in his arms. He learned to write using a gadget fitted over his hand to stabilize a pen. His therapist worked with him on the streets of Manhattan, helping him master getting on and off buses and navigating crowds. By the end of his stay, he had learned to manage on his own.
That summer, he watched the 1984 Olympics at his parents' house. "Here I was, the first son who was supposed to make a name for my family, in a wheelchair, like a broken trophy," he says. "My dad never verbalized his disappointment, but I felt it. I wanted to reverse it with my accomplishments."
That fall, Lee enrolled at New York University. He adjusted well despite inevitable challenges -- like falling out of his chair getting on a bus. "It freaked out the passengers," he says, laughing, "but I was a rambunctious college guy, and it didn't faze me at all."
What did faze him was the dean's refusal, during Lee's senior year, to recommend him for medical school. "He kept asking, 'How are you going to do this in a wheelchair?' " Lee recalls. For once, he gave up.
He decided instead to go to graduate school at Columbia University, and earned a master's in public health. While there, fellow students urged him not to abandon medicine. So, in 1993, Lee applied and was accepted at Dartmouth Medical School, where he became its first student in a wheelchair.
During New Hampshire's winters, Lee's chair got stuck in the snow; when it was stormy, he missed lectures. Impressed with his perseverance, classmates nicknamed him "S.B." -- short not for his given name, Seung-bok, but for Super Boy. The moniker has stuck.
His parents, who returned to South Korea in the mid-'90s, didn't attend his 2001 graduation. "That was one of my biggest disappointments," Lee says. "I had worked so hard toward that day."
Lee knew he wanted to work in physical rehabilitation, but wondered how patients would react to him. At Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he served as chief resident in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, senior physicians noted that Lee provided a sense of hope to spinal cord injury patients that no able-bodied doctor could.
More than 20 years after his accident, Lee completed his residency in 2005 and began receiving job offers from around the country. He chose to work at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute in a newly opened state-of-the-art spinal cord injury center with John McDonald, a pioneering neurologist who worked with Christopher Reeve before he died. "In the past," explains Dr. McDonald, "people with spinal cord injury received acute care followed by rehabilitation -- then nothing." McDonald advocates patterned exercise and electric stimulation, which can awaken dormant nerves.
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